Pinterest

Pinterest is now a top 10 social network (more traffic than Google Plus in November 2011!) that’s getting the attention of everyone from artists to the media to venture capitalists (who invested $27 million in the company). BrandChannel says “Pinterest is at the crossroads of social and style.” ReadWriteWeb attributes their success to the way the tool leverages everything that’s hot in social right now: great user experience, a clean retro visual design, content curation, social collaboration and subscription – and calls everyone who isn’t using it “a big dork.”

Of course, none of us want to own a “dorky” social media presence – so I wanted to put together a little introductory guide to Pinterest for hotels. I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with this site recently, and since it’s likely to be a key social communications tool in the months ahead, I think you may enjoy exploring it as well.

What is Pinterest?

“Think of it as a virtual pinboard,” says the Pinterest team. Heather Allard explains the opportunity well:

If you had the opportunity to make your business part of someone’s vision board, would you do it? Pinterest is that vision board. Consider it a visual buffet—a look book—of all the things we crave in life….

By curating cool content through images, the tool provides a powerful way to visually communicate lifestyle messages that are so important for many brands in the hospitality business. Plus, it’s a powerful way to feel the pulse of what’s trending – and influence some of those trends.

“Pinterest allows us to see what trends and styles the community likes based on engagement – likes and repins,” Nordstrom’s social media manager Shauna Causey told BrandChannel. Creativity-online.com commented that “Images are a great way to share ideas and trends in the social media landscape.”

How do you share photos?

Pinterest provides their users with a number of toolsto make sharing easy, including a “Pin It” button for your browser and a free iPhone app.

I find this to be the easiest way to share things as I’m browsing the web….

Hotel websites can use the Pinterest “Follow” button to encourage subscriptions and the “Pin It” button to encourage pinning and re-pinning from their site. Since this is a photo-sharing network, it’s one more reason to use stunning photography on your website. Photos shared on Pinterest contain a link back to the source site – which can be a good source of inbound traffic.

“…Consider Pinterest a ‘visual testimonial.’ When users pin things from your site, they’re showing the world (and their Pinterest followers) that they believe in your company, your service or your product. The more Pinterest interest you get, the more word of mouth about you will increase.” – Heather Allard

How can hotels use Pinterest?

Think about lifestyle content you can share that would interest your core audience online. Co-founder Evan Sharp gave some examples of how other companies are doing this in his interview with Mashable: “A good example of that is Whole Foods. They’re not just sharing the produce available at Whole Foods, they’re sharing [images of] a healthy lifestyle. West Elm isn’t just sharing the furniture they sell, they’re sharing interior design tips. And the Today Show isn’t just pinning that day’s guests [to promote the episode]. For most consumer brands, the idea behind your brand makes sense on Pinterest.”

Let’s take a look at how some hotels are using Pinterest….

Gansevoort Hotels shares places, spaces and style they love:

SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills shares books worth reading, food worth eating, and more:

And finally, Hotel Indigo does a great job of “guestsourcing” – using photos that guests have tweeted or uploaded as a Pinterest board:

You can see more by visiting Pinterest.com. Joining the network currently requires an invitation from an existing member. If you need one, email me: josiah at reviewpro

So what is the difference between a Facebook page and a Google+ page for Hotels?

Hotels now can take advantage of Google+ 

• Google Plus has the +1 button, while Facebook has the like button;
• Google Plus has Hangouts, while Facebook has video chat and group chat with Skype; and
• Google Plus has Circles, while Facebook has smart friend lists.

You can create a Google+ page for your business right now if you want. We already have a post up on How To Create A Google+ Page. Once you do, use these 11 tips to get your business started and moving in the right direction.

1. Use Google+ as a Page

To manage, edit or cruise Google+ AS your page, simply go to your Google+ profile homepage and click on the small down arrow under your name.

2. Add Images To Your Photostrip

To add images to create a ‘photostrip’ effect, click on the blue ‘edit profile’ button and then click ‘Add some photos here’. (http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/how-to-customise-your-google-plusprofile-page/)

3. Use Public Albums

Be sure to share photos with all followers, as albums in the Photos tab are visible only to people with whom they’ve been shared.

4. Use Photo Geo Location

If you want to show your hotel geo location information in newly uploaded albums and photos, be sure to check the box under the ‘Photos’ tab when editing your page. (Shown below)

Geo location check-box feature in Google+.

5. Fill Out Page Circles

As your brand page, you can start adding other Google+ members and pages to your ‘circles.’ In order to add people to your circles, they need to add your page to their circles first. The page circle options include:  Following, Customers, VIP’s and Team Members. There are several options allowing you to control what follower info users can view on your page’s sidebar.

6. Know How Comments Work

Your personal G+ profile can comment on brand pages, even if you haven’t followed them. However, I wasn’t able to comment on a brand page AS another brand page, whether I was following that brand or not.

7. Host a Hangout

Google is pushing ‘Hangouts’ or video chats for businesses. This feature allows your hotel brand to start live, face-to-face conversations with followers. The Muppets were one of the first to promote a live hangout on their Google+ page. You can see a video snippet about the event along with other Google Plus Hangouts here: http://www.youtube.com/googleplushangouts

8. Connect to Other Platforms

The ability to update Facebook and Twitter from Google+ is on the way. Google has given limited access to their Google+ API to developers and I’m sure additional access will be granted soon. All the API and geeky tech stuff you ever want to know can be found here:  Google+ Platform Developers - https://developers.google.com/+/overview. If you use Chrome, you can install one of my fave Google+ sharing apps, Publish Sync. This app allows you to update both Facebook and Twitter from your Google+ profile. Currently, the app doesn’t work for my brand page, but it could soon.

9. Disable Comments Option

You can disable comments on posts you share via your Brand page. When you disable comments on a post, other people will no longer be able to leave comments (but they can still +1 and reshare it).

10. Plus One or Circle

There are currently 2 calls to action for your potential followers: Have them ‘circle’ you (or add your brand page to their circles) and +1 your page. It’s unclear currently how Google will leverage those who are +1-ing your page as it appears simply taking that action doesn’t allow the user to get any brand updates.

As mentioned above, Google is calculating how many users +1 your page into their search results. And they are still the masters at search. So it makes sense that this will be important in Google Search. We will have to wait and see.

11. Custom URL

Google isn’t yet allowing for customizing your brand page URL. However, there have been several tools created for that purpose. I used this one to shorten my brand’s page: http://gplus.to/. 

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Read Original Article or visit Hotel Marketing Argentina

Export Email Addresses of your Facebook Contacts

There’s  a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.

The trick, as you can see in the video, is actually quite simple.

Go to address.yahoo.com and click the Facebook icon. A login dialog should pop-up, just sign-in with your Facebook credentials and within seconds, you entire Facebook address book will be available inside your Yahoo Mail Account. Once the import is done, click this link to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.

You can then import the CSV file into Gmail Contacts, LinkedIn, your phone address book or any of the social sites where you want to connect with your existing Facebook circle.

7 errores que debemos evitar al crear una página de aterrizaje para su hotel.

 1: Llamado a la acción poco claro 

Asegúrese de que el tráfico se envía a una página donde está claramente definida la acción deseada. Si buscamos por ejemplo reservar una noche , entonces ponemos un gran botón visible que permite al cliente a reservar una habitacion .

 2: las distracciones visuales son Demasiadas 

Una página llena de distracciones visuales , si sus fotos de los productos o banners intermitentes o los anuncios de AdSense son muchos, es probable que no conviertan.Mantener la página simple, limpia, y al punto.

 3: demasiado texto 

Una página de destino no debe ser con mucho texto. Utilice frases cortas y simples, y transmitir el mensaje con viñetas.

4: No mantener las promesas 

Su Adcopy dice: Compre 2 y obtenga 1 gratis, pero si esta misma oferta, no se puede encontrar en la página de destino, que no están cumpliendo esa promesa. Si usted tiene una oferta atractiva en su Adcopy, asegúrese de que es fácil de encontrar en la página de destino.

 5: Formularios muy largos 

Mantener las formas lo más breve y conciso posible. Sólo ponga  campos  absolutamente  esenciales

6: Reductores de riesgo 

Si su negocio está acreditado por el BBB, o si su sitio es seguro y prueba de hackers a diario, asegúrese de incluir los logotipos de la parte superior.

 7: Indicadores de Confianza 

Por ejemplo, si el nombre de Conde Nast menciono su hotel como uno de los “500 Mejores Hoteles del Mundo”, y agregó este indicador de confianza sin duda ayudará a aumentar la confianza, y seguro que la conversión tambien.
En resumen, la construcción de una página de destino es una necesidad absoluta para el tráfico de PPC. Puede atender a las necesidades del usuario, basándose en su búsqueda. Por ejemplo, si alguien escribe “bariloche hotel económico”, una página se puede crear con el top 5 razones por las que su hotel es de gran valor. Cuando un usuario se puede conectar emocionalmente y se ven como el público en su página, que es cuando se sabe que tiene una página de aterrizaje ganadora. Por último, no basta con crear una página de destino e igonorarla Siempre pruebe los diferentes elementos para ver si el cambio puede aumentar aún más la conversión.

Hotel SEO Factors

On-site SEO factors-

• Use hyphens or commas as “Page Title” or header separators - not underscores. 
• If possible use a file extension (.html) or at least have mime type to help Google and also users.
• You can “unleash” hundreds of pages (obviously all with great content) at once with no penalty -thousands of new pages, however, “may” flag up for review. 
• A HTML Sitemap is still recommended by Google for googlebots & for users. 
• Google does not “penalise” duplicate content - it will just show one page over another.  If there are 3 pages of duplicate content on your website it generally will only show 1 result on a Google results page, (unless the search is incredibly longtail and specific – but of course we now get the “omitted results” link displayed). Google just shows the content that it feels is most relevant to the users search. New algorithms take into account things like content age (so original content is more likely to rank higher). (Greg gives the best explanation, not Matt) 
• A webpage being 4 levels down in the URL (example.com/some-news/2011/march/a-great-news-article.htm) is just as valuable as a webpage 1 level down (example.com/a-great-news-article.htm) IF linked to from a top level page. 
• In SEO terms,“example.com/tools/hammers/a-great-hammer” is no different than having  ”example.com/tools-hammer-a-great-hammer”. In user terms, however, it can start to look spammy to have multiple keywords separated by a hyphen. 
• “Read More” dropdowns CAN be seen as hidden text (blackhat) if large areas of text are hidden with only a small area of visible text. If there are reams and reams of text hidden below a javascript/accordion type button with only a few words always visible then it will show as being hidden text to Google. Instead use tabs to show as much content as possible that switches with tabbed buttons. 
• Using the visitors IP address to change the title & heading to the local language/dialect is perfectly acceptable. Geo-location content is not classed as content cloaking. 
• It is better to have keywords in the URL as it is taken as a factor in the ranking results, albeit only one of over 200. 

Links and off-site factors

• Google will not penalise a website that uses the “no follow” attribute on all of its outbound links – 
• On-site links are no longer restricted to 100 links per page (as Google guidelines used to state). It is perfectly reasonable to have more if the page and site is rich in content. Common sense is needed, however, as 1000′s of links on a page could indicate a link farm. Also keep in mind that pagerank on a page is divided out to the links on the page (a PR4 page with 40 links will mean each link gets a 1/40th chunk of the PR) so it may be beneficial to have only important pages linked to from a high PR site. 
• Links at the bottom of the page are treated differently than ones at the top or within the content body.
• The amount of 301 redirects to a domain will not penalise you. 301 redirects carry link text (anchor text) but if there are too many new links being generated to a 301 redirected URL it could look shady. 
• More from Hotel SEO at Hotel Marketing Argentina.

4 Simple Steps to Getting Started With Mobile Marketing

#1: Set up your mobile website

One option is to use the automated systems offered by many companies. They essentially take your existing website content and auto-format it for a mobile screen.

WordPress has some plugins that do a pretty good job of this and GoDaddy has an automated system that does it, too. But for the best user experience, I recommend you focus on one of the options outlined below.

Your mobile home page should have a clean and simple design. On the left is the standard 60 Second Marketer home page seen on a smart phone. On the right is the mobile version of the site.

Option number two is to use one of the many plug-and-play platforms offered online. These companies actually create a separate mobile website that is completely independent from your regular website.

Just Google “How to set up a mobile website” and you’ll find a number of companies doing this. There are some good organizations offering these plug-and-play systems, but there are also some real losers, so do your research before you choose a company to work with.

Mobicanvas.com, GetGoMobi.com and Onswipe.com all seem to have good solid platforms to work from.

You can build and manage your website quickly and easily!

A third option is to add a simple line of code onto your existing home page that “sniffs out” the screen size of the person visiting your site.

If the person visiting your site has a screen that’s more than 600 pixels wide, they’re probably coming from a PC and are directed to your regular site. If the screen is smaller than 600 pixels, they’re probably coming from a mobile device and will be redirected to pages designed for a smartphone screen.

#2: Claim your business on location-based platforms

You should claim your business on location-based platforms like Foursquare,Gowalla and Facebook Places, especially if you have a brick-and-mortar location.

#3: Run a mobile ad campaign.

A mobile ad campaign is great for all kinds of companies, but particularly good for companies that have brick-and-mortar locations. After all, if you own a restaurant, wouldn’t you want to have an ad pop up when someone searches for “restaurants near my house”?

Mobile ad campaigns can be bought on a cost-per-click basis, a cost-per-thousand basis or a cost-per-acquisition basis.

Sound confusing? Don’t worry—just visit any of the most popular mobile advertising platforms (like Millennial Media, iAd from Apple or AdMob from Google) and they’ll walk you through the distinctions and how to use the services

#4: Scan a QR Code.

QR Codes are those little barcode-like squares that are popping up all over the place.

QR Codes (or their closely related cousins EZ Codes, Microsoft Tags, SPARQCodes, etc.) can be scanned by smartphones. Once scanned, they drive you through to mobile web pages that offer discount coupons, bonus content, special offers or some other additional content.

How to Combine QR Codes With the Power of Facebook ?

How to use QR codes for hotels (Español)

Read original article at Social Media Examiner.

Most reliable link building technique

• Creating a unique piece of content that "major" blogs and websites would be willing to promote, link to, or mention to their social media followers which would result in links. 
•  Find out 10-20 blogs, websites that would be potential link prospects meaning they would be websites that have a history of linking out to quality articles and content.
• After finding those 10-20 websites, use the Google Reader and add those websites RSS feeds to the reader.
• About 2-5 days or so, start figuring out the type of content they are creating, than use Quantcast.com to figure out their audience demographics.

Once you have acquired the necessary data, than use this data to picture their readers Persona.

• After this process, now you have a general idea on what would be the best type of content possible that their readers would enjoy and share to their friends if you were to create it.
• Now you want to create the content (content can be Infographics, aritcles, videos, podcasts, slideshare, diagrams, etc get creative!)
• After you have created the content, now you begin your outreach process and start contacting these websites, and pitch them the content which you have created on your website and why they should mention this content to their readers

 "People give out Links, Not Websites"

                                                            Asim Ahmed (original post)

• Other excellent strategies for linkbuilding are Guest Posts, Niche Directory Submissions 
•  Article Directory sites, after the release of Panda many of these sites have lost even MORE value than what they have lost previously over the past couple of years after Google has been battling with Article Spammers 

Find more info about Off Page SEO for Hotels by Hotel Marketing Argentina (Español)

 

 

What's a Keyword? And Why Do I Need to Worry About Them?

When people go to Google, they search for things. As of June 2011, more than 3 billion searches happen every day on Google (and lots happen on Bing + Yahoo!, too). A good portion of those people are searching for information about travel, and if you build your site right and do a bit of what SEOs call "keyword research" (figuring out what people search for and how) along with "keyword targeting" (using those words and phrases in smart places on your pages), you can earn positions in the search rankings and get lots of high quality, valuable visitors coming to your site.

For example, in the search I've done above, you can see that Geraldine's post - The Shops of Covent Garden, London - is ranking in position 5. On average, about 5% of searchers for that query will likely click on her page. If there's 100 searches for that phrase each month, Geraldine will get 5 extra visits to her site every month. If she wrote 5 blog posts every day that performed like this, in a few years she'd have some pretty amazing traffic. And, of course, if she got to ranking #1 or #2 for some of those keywords or ranked #5 for things people search for 1,000 times each month, that could be even more exciting.

In the SEO world, we call the search words and phrases that people type into Google and Bing "keywords," and we do our best to understand what people are searching for, build great pages that would make those searchers happy and try to rank high in the results to earn as many of those clicks as possible. The first part of that - understanding what people are searching for, is the critical part of "keyword research." Here's how you do that:

(sadly, this isn't the best example, because there's so few searches for the phrase, but you get the idea)

The screenshot above comes from Google's AdWords Keyword Tool. It's the best known keyword research tool on the web, and is likely the only one you'll need as a travel blogger unless you become very advanced at SEO. There's a few important things to understand about the tool, so I've made some notations with red numbers:

1. This is where you enter the words to describe what you're writing about. You can use one or two words or try to be more specific. The words Google suggests will be based on what you enter here.
2. For travel bloggers, I generally would recommend that you use the language you'll be writing in, but don't exclude any countries. Travelers search from all over the world! Don't just limit your keyword research to the United States.
3. This is very important, even if it seems a bit complex at first. The "match type" refers to the suggestions Google will give you, and if you're not careful, this can really throw you for a loop. Basically, "exact match" is what you want most of the time (but it's not checked by default, so be sure to do that!). Exact match means that Google will only show you the keywords and search volume for that particular keyword phrase. If you use broad match or phrase match, you'll often see a much higher volume of searches, but it doesn't mean that this quantity of people actually performed that search. You can learn more about match types here.
4. Here's your data! Looking at these keyword "suggestions" you can see what Google knows about that people search for around these keywords and how many people are performing those searches globally. The "competition" column doesn't matter too much for you here - it refers to the number of advertisers who bid against a keyword and how much they pay, but since you'll be targeting the "free" or "organic" searches, you don't need to worry about these.
5. Google will also give some keyword "ideas" that relate to your search terms, but don't match them exactly. This can be handy for finding opportunities of things to write about or what to title your posts.

When it comes to the AdWords Keyword Tool, I recommend you play around with it - experiment, have fun, see what different clicks and buttons do, the works! Just remember - the numbers Google reports are, relatively speaking, accurate, but not precise. So, if Google says that keyword 1 has 100 searches/month and keyword 2 has 200/month, that doesn't mean that precisely that many people search each month for those words. But, it does probably mean that keyword 2 gets about twice as many searches as keyword 1.

OK. You know how to see what people search for and now you're ready to start writing some posts to earn some of those rankings and get some visitors. But, what do you actually do with those keywords?

Use them smartly in your blog posts!

I've got an entire post dedicated to best practices for using keywords in your pages, but the simple rule of thumb is:

• Make the important keyword phrase the first words in your blog post's title (if possible)
• Use other relevant, important and/or identifying keywords in the title (for example, Geraldine's post on this topic was wisely labeled, The Shops of Covent Garden, London - both to indicate its location and because people might search for "covent garden shops, london")
• Make the headline of the piece/page match the title (searchers don't like to click on one thing and get another!)
• Use the keyword phrase and other important keywords in the content of the post - don't stuff or spam them in unnaturally, just try to include them where relevant and appropriate
• If you can, make your URLs (this thing - http://www.everywhereist.com/the-shops-of-covent-garden-london/) use the keyword as well. This is pretty easy to do in Wordpress and most other blog platforms 

That's it! That's really all you need to do on the keyword front. If you need it in once sentence, it's this:

Find the words and phrases people use to search and include them prominently in the blog posts you write. 

If you've done that, you're well on your way to good SEO.

Read Original Article here

Evitar contenido duplicado con la sindicacion.

La mayoría de editores web o bloggers buscan publicar contenidos de calidad en sus webs, generalmente contenidos relevantes que interesen a lectores y a otros editores que mencionen y enlacen sus artículos desde otros sites. La sindicación de contenidos es una valiosa táctica para obtener valiosos backlinks de los cuales se benefician aquellos que publican buenos contenidos originales.

“Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.”

El problema de la sindicación es el contenido duplicado, ya que según el análisis del buscador, el contenido original puede ser interpretado como contenido repetido. Google ya lo indicó en un artículo sobre contenido duplicado en el su Webmaster Central Blog:

En el caso que alguien esté interesado en un artículo original publicado por nosotros y utilice una copia del mismo en su site, ésta puede hacer que ambos contenidos sean interpretados como duplicados. En ese caso el buscador mostraría uno de los dos en los resultados de búsqueda, y no quedaría claro cual de ellos es el original, por lo que siempre existiría un riesgo de que a ojos del buscador, la autoría del artículo no se reconozca como tal.

¿Y cuales son las mejores soluciones para que el buscador entienda la sindicación y no interprete el contenido como duplicado?

Existen diversas técnicas a tener en cuenta (todas son útiles pero en cada caso en particular se utilizarían una u otra, todo depende de como queremos recibir los backlinks). A continuación mostramos 3 opciones interesantes:

1. Configurar la sindicación para que solo se publique una sinopsis (una introducción o primer párrafo de lo que ofrece el artículo original)

Muchos sites de noticias, como por ejemplo en Top.org, utilizan este tipo de sindicación. Aportando así un backlink de calidad hacia la web del editor del artículo original ya que es muy habitual encontrar que en estos sites ofrecen artículos y más información relacionada con el artículo sindicado en cuestión.

2. Utilizar del metatag ‘No index’ en la página de la copia del artículo original.

La implementación de este metatag sería un requisito que se le pediría al editor que se aprobecha de los contenidos originales. Cabe decir que esta etiqueta ‘No index’, solamente evita que Google no indexe el artículo de nuevo (y así se evita que aparezca en los resultados naturales) y que aún así el valor del backlink no se pierde ya que el aporte de PageRank se acumula de igual forma en la página del original.

Si quieres más información sobre este metatag y su uso, consúltalo aquí.

3. Utilización del tag ‘canonical’ cuando se indica el enlace a la fuente original

El uso de esta instrucción entre diferentes dominios es relativamente nuevo, Google lo hizo oficial hace un mes atrás aunque ya funcionaba con Yahoo! y Bing. Ésta instrucción permite utilizar exactamente el mismo contenido en diferentes sites indicando cual es la dirección del contenido original. Por ejemplo, si tuvieramos el artículo original en la direccion ‘http://www.miweb.com/articulo-original.html” y una copia en la dirección “http://www.otraweb.com/copia-articulo-original.html”, en ésta última debería aparecer este enlace en el encabezado de la sección:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.miweb.com/articulo-original.html” />

Tal y como pasa con el metatag ‘No index’, la utilización de este tag no evita la acumulación de PageRank a la página donde esté situado el artículo original.

Para más información sobre la utilización de este tag, consulta el artículo del blog de webmasters de Google.

También recomiendo echar un vistazo a este gráfico extraído de 

Hotel Marketing Argentina, donde se muestra de una forma muy ilustrativa el proceso de análisis, por parte de los buscadores, de los contenidos duplicados. 

Ver Articulo original en Canalip

Si te intereso este articulo este otro te puede resultar productivo : Cómo configurar tu blog para generar backlinks con el Feed RSS